Commandments rule bucked in Barrow

Posted: Wednesday, November 16, 2005

WINDER - Four months after Barrow County paid $150,000 in legal fees and agreed to take down a Ten Commandments display to end an American Civil Liberties Union-backed lawsuit, other copies of the Judeo-Christian doctrine were hanging in a public part of the same courthouse this week.

That changed Tuesday, when county administrators removed four copies of the Ten Commandments from public areas in the Clerk of Superior Court office in the courthouse.

"They were in an area that could be defined as a public space," said Keith Lee, Barrow County's chief of operations.

It is not clear when the employees, at their own expense, purchased and hung the displays in the office. The footer of the poster read: "Paid for by the citizens of Barrow County who support the Ten Commandments."

In September 2003, the ACLU on behalf of an anonymous resident filed a federal lawsuit against Barrow County over a Ten Commandments display in a breezeway in the Barrow County Courthouse.

In July, Barrow officials backed out of the lawsuit and agreed to remove the display from the courthouse's breezeway.

Under the federal court order that concluded the lawsuit, Barrow County employees cannot display the Ten Commandments on public property.

However, county employees can display the Ten Commandments "in any form or any place on his or her person or in his or her personal office so long as such display is not in any public area of any building or property under the authority of the Barrow County Board of Commissioners," U.S. District Judge William O'Kelley said in the July order.

"There was no intent on their part to violate the court order," Lee said of the employees who hung the Ten Commandments in the clerk's office.

"I can assure you it was an oversight," Human Resources Director Norma Jean Brown said. "We don't want anybody to lose their privilege of hanging (the Ten Commandments) in their own office."

Clerk's office employees referred all calls to Clerk of Courts Gloria Wall, who was not in the office Tuesday. The ACLU on Tuesday did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment about the displays in the clerk's office.

As a part of O'Kelley's order, Barrow County paid "John Doe," the anonymous resident, $1 in damages and $150,000 in legal fees he incurred in the suit. Ten Commandments-Georgia Inc., a private group headquartered in Hartwell, paid Barrow County's $273,000 legal costs, but did not reimburse the county for the $150,000 to cover John Doe's expenses. The county's taxpayers are on the hook for paying those expenses.